A wee update.

Here are a few things that I've done / been up to recently:

If you've ever come round this way at all in the last two years (TWO YEARS! I know...) you might be aware that I'm 'architecture correspondent' for ICON magazine. Well; issue 101 is out now and in there you'll find the usual roundup of what's new in architecture, in this case a crystalline sports complex in China and a strange japanese bridge structure that pretends to be a massive version of a traditional east-asian timber joint detail. Further in however, and there's a full-length interview with Shiguru Ban, discussing the varying strands to his career and his attitude to architecture in general. It's worth reading just to get a sense of the way that Ban manages to conceptually spin the plates of structural experimenter, fashionable designer, recycling advocate, disaster relief specialist and so on...

I've got a few articles, reviews, lectures in the pipeline. I'll try to remember to let you know about them when they turn up, try to get the muddy, near-ossified juices of self-promotion flowing.

In quieter moments I've been engaging in musical activities, when time allows. In the last week or two this has thrown up the following little ditties:

A Cat's Skeleton by entschwindet und vergeht
This is a little sketch I made, featuring a little clip from the cheery kitchen sink/apocalypse TV drama 'Threads' from 1984. I guess the fact that the clip shows a crackly vhs recording of a BBC children's educational programme being played to post-nuclear holocaust weans puts this very much into the venerable tradition of hauntoyadayada.

Schubert - 'Wehmut' D.772 by entschwindet und vergeht
Slightly more serious here, I've transcribed and recorded a guitar version of Schubert's lied 'Wehmut' (melancholy), which is a typically 'Sturm und Drang' kind of a piece, although significant here because the poem, by Matthaus von Collin, goes a little something like this:

Wenn ich durch Wald und Fluren geh',

Es wird mir dann so wohl und weh

In unruhvoller Brust.

So wohl, so weh, wenn ich die Au

In ihrer Schönheit Fülle schau',

Und all die Frühlingslust.

Denn was im Winde tönend weht,

Was aufgetürmt gen Himmel steht,

Und auch der Mensch, so hold vertraut

Mit all der Schönheit, die er schaut,

Entschwindet, und vergeht.